


Insomnia

by Runs_With_Moogles



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Curtains, falling asleep
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 18:30:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3860215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runs_With_Moogles/pseuds/Runs_With_Moogles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The members of the Avengers and what they do with the small hours when they can't sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Luminosity

When Steve plopped himself down on his new bed in the tower, a large box where his pillow should have been hit him in the face. Rubbing the spot, he sat up and turned on the lights, his hands searching for an envelope or a note.

On the side there was a piece of heavy weight paper with delicate flowers doodled on the corners in pen. In light handed cursive the note read;

“Found these the other day and thought of you. Thought you might want to properly celebrate not being color blind any longer.  
-Love, Natasha”

He opened the box and found it full of acrylics- they were small bottles and probably about forty of them, arranged by pallet. There were pastels, and vibrants and muted colors and a set of metallics and even a small array of neons that almost hurt to look at but Steve was enthralled. He began unpacking them onto his bed and found a small set of brushes and a paint pad at the bottom along with a plastic pallet. He spent no time at all sinking to the floor and painting with furor. He wasn’t even really painting anything, just large strokes and big blobs, mixing the paint together by painting wet on wet, and seeing how they looked side by side. Any memory of tiredness from the sixteen hours he spent training was gone. 

It was hours before he stood up to pop his back and refill the water by his bedside he repurposed to clean the brushes. By the sink he sent Natasha a quick text that was mostly just exclamation points.

When he sat back down, he began to paint more concretely, this time hands and eyes and patches of starry sky and things he could see around like his phone and a tape dispenser. He slowed down enough to pick up a pencil and sketch first for a while but discarded it. He painted a weeping willow in a garden of over saturated colors and then one of a darkened jazz club—that one was just for Natasha.

His eyes felt old and strained before he finally went to sleep with pages of doodles littering his bedside floor, drying in the cold cover of dawn.


	2. Like Vines

Clint turns over in bed, unable to sleep because his muscles are too sore, not the refreshing kind, the kind where you spend all day thinking through each action and movement until everything aches. He feels like a wind up toy. Unable to have organic movement any longer as he pushes himself off his bed and up to pace around. In the small light he dug in his sock drawer until his hand hit the delicately tangled knot that was his latest project.

Knitting was calming, something Natasha had taught him how to do one night on the way to one of their missions. He remembered that night, it was the first night they didn’t have to hide under the cover of darkness, and the few other agents on the bus kept looking at them being quiet as mice in the corner as force of habit. They spent the time trying to force their voices a little louder, talking about their usual aliases and the weird stuff they decided to learn for them- like the knitting which Natasha learned by sheer force of will when she had to be a quirky teacher’s assistant.

That was ten years ago, Natasha has since mostly forgotten how to knit but even now the rhythm and the soft clicking sound is soothing to him. His windup motions seemed to flow away, somehow in the repetition, he stopped overthinking his posture and relaxed.

He wondered if Natasha knew that he still knit and he figured she did. They never told each other much but always knew everything.

He fell asleep two hours later, needles in hand and a five foot long scarf draped in his lap, hands itching and cramped but altogether pleased.


	3. Lexicon

Natasha did pushups. She did yoga. She put on really good pop music at a quiet volume and turned on all the lamps, leaving the overhead off. She didn’t work until she sweat, she worked until she got a cramp and then switched to the other side. Sometimes she put on eyeliner until it was perfect and thicker than she would wear as Agent Romanov for kicks so she would look pretty when she bent backwards in front of the mirror.

When that failed, in her thick sweats and impeccable makeup, she tidied. She started by moving all of her furniture around, and basking in the fact that she had furniture and she could pick where it went. Then she dusted every surface, stopping in between surfaces to do twenty sit-ups. She would rearrange the prints she had been given by Pepper, reorganize her jewelry tree so it was by color rather than size. 

In the extreme boredom that only came at two in the morning after doing a bunch of menial tasks she would finally crack open a book and read it while sitting upside down on her bed to stretch out her abs. The book was from a large stack suggested by her comrades- friends, she corrected loudly in her head, almost saying it out loud. Bruce gave her a large stack of the books she didn’t get to read when she was growing up but that everyone should, they were easy books but ones that she found entertaining— The Velveteen Rabbit, A Wrinkle in Time, The Golden Compass. Clint gifted her with the Harry Potter books, each in a different language that she could speak. Tony had given her a stack of strange scifi novels.

She’d be hard pressed to admit it, but Tony’s were actually her favorite. Escapism at best but in a self aware way the other books weren’t. She liked them because they tended to be brutally honest about how humanity would really react extreme situations. She still couldn’t bring herself to read Clockwork Orange.

She fell asleep with her feet resting on the wall, folded into an L with The Prisoner of Azkaban gently smooshing her nose, loving the deep feeling of normalcy in her chest.

**Author's Note:**

> i did this before i knew what it really was going to be so the rest of the chapters are going to be a bit different.


End file.
